Red Hat’s, Brian Stevens, claims that the desktop is dead. This may seem a trifle premature, but from my own perspective, that has already been the case for several years.

Across the room, from where I’m typing this, I have a formal computer desk, complete with comfortable “executive” chair, adjustable foot-rest (your feet will love you till the day they drop off if you buy them one of these), nice, fast AMD64 tower case, and a 19 inch IBM-Lenovo LCD screen, to look at everything.

For the last couple of months I’ve been on a mammoth trip to the east, or east as far as my home in the UK is concerned, to relatives in Malaysia. As they live in the more rural areas of the country, internet connectivity was not as good as I’m accustomed to and was quite unreliable. So, therefore, I wasn’t able to keep my blog as up-to-date as I would have liked. That’s my excuse anyway, and it sounds so much better than “I was having such a great time I simply let things slip”.

I own an old, quite customised Thinkpad a21m laptop, which I still use intensively when I’m out of town: with 256 Mb of RAM, a 750 MHz Pentium 3 chip and a 1024x768 screen running off an ATI chip, I can run pretty much all recent GNU/Linux distros around. I also have built a nice living-room warmer based off an Athlon64 X2 3800+ with a big, fat hard disk and more RAM than you can shake a stick at (well, almost). Is there a problem here?

If I tell you that I need to download ten (10) different CD images to install both according to their specificities, maybe you’ll get it.